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Common Prayer explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and largely misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. This provocatively revisionist argument will have major implications for early modern studies. Through readings of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and his translations of the Psalms, John Donne's sermons and poems, and George Herbert's The Temple, Targoff uncovers the period's pervasive and often surprising interest in cultivating public and formalized models of worship. At the heart of this study lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry; Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship come to be deeply intertwined. New literary practices, then, became a powerful means of forging common prayer, or controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.
This book is a beautiful and dramatic collection of Celtic praise, compiled by Church of Scotland minister and Gaelic scholar Alistair Maclean, which was first published in 1937. It comprises over one hundred prayers, poems, sayings, and praises from the Christian tradition of the author's native Hebrides.
The man of our time does not know how to pray, writes the French theologian Jacques Ellul, "but much more than that, he has neither the desire nor the need to do so. He does not find the deep source of prayer within himself. I am acquainted with this man. I know him well. It is I, myself." Out of this common experience, the prominent social critic and former resistance leader makes a searing analysis of man's alienation from God, and traces the reasons for praying or not praying. With razor-like statements, he cuts through the weaknesses of much traditional praying and, in the end, offers a strong and positive program for praying in today's troubled times.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL “Shatteringly powerful . . . I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.”—Harold Bloom The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication. Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual. Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do. Praise for Book of Numbers “The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet.”—Rolling Stone “A startlingly talented novelist.”—The Wall Street Journal “Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen’s literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books
Written centuries before Christ, the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible have been prayed by Christians since the founding of the Church. The early church fathers expounded the psalms in the light of the mystery of Christ, his death and resurrection, and his saving redemption. In this book, a Benedictine monk examines the Christian praying of the Psalms, taking into account modern and contemporary research on the Psalms. Working from the Hebrew text, Fr. Laurence Kriegshauser offers a verse-by-verse commentary on each of the one hundred and fifty psalms, highlighting poetic features such as imagery, rhythm, structure, and vocabulary, as well as theological and spiritual dimensions and the relation of psalms to each other in the smaller collections that make up the whole. The book attempts to integrate modern scholarship on the Psalms with the act of prayer and help Christians pray the psalms with greater understanding of their Christological meaning. The book contains an introduction, a glossary of terms, an index of topics, a table of English renderings of selected Hebrew words, and an index of biblical citations. Praying the Psalms in Christ will be welcomed by students of theology and liturgy, by priests, religious, and laypeople who pray the Liturgy of the Hours, and by all Christians who seek to pray the Psalms with greater profit and fervor.
Ulrich L. Lehner reintroduces Christians to the true God—not the polite, easygoing, divine therapist who doesn’t ask much of us, but the Almighty God who is unpredictable, awe-inspiring, and demands our entire lives. Stripping away the niceties with a sling blade, Lehner shows that God is more strange and beautiful than we imagine, and wants to know and transform us in the most intimate way. With his iconoclastic new book God Is Not Nice, Lehner, one of the most promising young Catholic theologians in America, challenges the God of popular culture and many of our churches and reintroduces the God of the Bible and traditional Christianity. As Lehner writes in the book’s introduction, "We all need the vaccine of the true transforming and mysterious character of God: The God who shows up in burning bushes, speaks through donkeys, drives demons into pigs, throws Saul from his horse, and appears to St. Francis. It’s only this God who has the power to challenge us, change us, and make our lives dangerous. He sweeps us into a great adventure that will make us into different people." This book is not safe. It may startle and annoy many people—including those who purport to teach and preach the Gospel, but are missing it, according to Lehner. God Is Not Nice intends to overthrow all of our popular misconceptions about God, inviting us to ask deeper questions about the nature of our lives and our relationship with him. When you're finished with God Is Not Nice, you may find the idols you constructed in God’s name smashed, replaced with a God who will ask you to live an entirely different life full of hope and transformation. God Is Not Nice has been translated into several foreign languages.
In Compelling God, Stephanie Clark examines the relationship between prayer, gift giving, the self, and community in Anglo-Saxon England.
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system—“suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in Poetry and Its Others, Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring poetry’s vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law’s rationalism. But poetry’s most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, Poetry and Its Others shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.
What if prayer could be simple rather than strenuous? Anxious, results-driven Christians can never pray enough, serve enough, or study enough. But what if God is calling us not to frenzied activity but to a simple spiritual encounter? What if we must merely receive what God has already given us? In Flee, Be Silent, Pray, writer and contemplative retreat leader Ed Cyzewski guides readers out of the anxiety factory of contemporary Christianity and toward a God whose love astounds those quiet long enough to receive it. With helpful guidance into solitude, contemplative prayer, and practices such as lectio divina and the Examen, Cyzewski guides readers toward the Christ whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. Ready to shed the fear of the false self and the exhaustion of a duty-driven faith? Flee. Be silent. Pray.
What if you promised God you would do anything . . . and he took you up on it? Anything is a prayer of surrender that will move you to stop chasing happiness and start living a surrendered life that matters. If you’ve ever felt lonely, lost, or like there must be more to life than constantly keeping up with the Joneses, then this book is for you. Previously caught in the dizzying haze of worldly happiness and empty pursuits, Jennie had had enough. She and her husband Zac prayed a courageous prayer of surrender: "God, we will do anything. Anything." They went on to begin living out the adventure God had written for them. This revised edition is updated throughout to include a new introduction and an in-depth Bible study component for those who have been wanting to lead a study on this topic. Join Jennie on an adventure to discover your anything, including: Factors that inhibit us from living a life of surrender to God What praying "Anything" really means What your life might look like having prayed it Jennie Allen shares the biblical truth that our lives are not meant to be safe and comfortable, but radical and profound. Discover how little worldly pursuits mean until you know the God who’s truly worth giving up everything for. And when you do. . . everything will change. Anything is also available in Spanish, Lo que me pidas.